True Detective Is the Most Addictive Kind of TV

Season two of the HBO drama, starring Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, and Rachel McAdams, returns June 21.

Warning: This review contains mild spoilers about the new season of True Detective.

As I was watching the second-season premiere of True Detective, I found myself in a predicament: There were 15 minutes left in the episode but only 10 minutes until I had to pick up my son from school. So I innovated—I realized that I could watch on my phone. And so I found myself walking obliviously through a rather lovely June day, watching as I walked. This new low point for me personally is, of course, a high point for the makers of True Detective, which returns June 21.

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Based on the three episodes HBO sent to critics, the second season of True Detective is nearly as addictive as the first. (And like that one, it is created and written entirely by Nic Pizzolatto, though with a new cast, story, and directors.) It poses as a potboiler, but it's really an exercise in genre fused with existentialism. This time, instead of The King in Yellow, a copy of the Hagakure sits on a coffee table. It's the kind of show in which gangsters say things like Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eat. and crooked cops say things like We get the world we deserve.

Like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson last year, the actors eat it up. Colin Farrell is the height (or depth) of loucheness with a moustache that deserves a screen credit in its own right. Vince Vaughn can almost keep up, as a criminal on the cusp of going legitimate. But the revelation is Rachel McAdams, as Ani Bezzerides, a female detective who thinks that the difference between men and women is that one gender can strangle the other to death—a refugee from a cult family who ends up arresting her sister in a webcam porn bust, a woman who drinks and gambles and has sex with men, it seems, mainly for the pleasure of throwing them away after. Her voice quakes with rage and anguish and fear and disgust and despair. In her ragged hatred of the world as it is, she is sexy as hell.

Around these performances swirls I guess what you could call a plot. A murder victim has his eyes burned out with acid and his genitals shot off. A land deal begins to fall apart and has to be rescued. Maybe it will all make sense in the end, but then again maybe not. The potential plot incoherence doesn't really matter. The great films noir have never really had much time for sensible plots anyway: During the making of The Big Sleep, William Faulkner and the other screenwriters couldn't figure out how one of the characters was killed. So they telegraphed Raymond Chandler, who had written the original book. Chandler tersely responded that he had no idea. Howard Hawks, the director of The Big Sleep,admitted, "I never could figure the story out." That same spirit applies here. The plot is mostly mood. There is no other show on television that is so exclusively about its own style.

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Why is True Detective so addictive, then? Renowned media thinker Marshall McLuhan said that you don't read a newspaper, you step into it the way you would step into a warm bath—a metaphor that is entirely appropriate to True Detective. The show is an atmosphere that is equal parts apocalyptic dread, intellectual despair, and beautiful cynicism. That's better than a walk through a beautiful June day any time.

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